How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else

by Jeffrey J. Kripal

this particular impossible practice—intentionally focused on the imaginal, the supernormal, and the paranormal—is very much in the Husserlian mode in that it is normative and not purely descriptive. It is all about the nature of reality. It is not an example of what is generally thought of as “religious studies” today. The latter discipline, as part of the conventional humanities, is defined by a very different kind of bracketing that can be summarized like this: “Set aside all beliefs, yours or theirs. Do not consider whether such a human experience, conviction, or conclusion is ‘true’ or not—that is, whether it corresponds to reality in some way—but rather describe everything neutrally. Do not take a position. Do not admit an ontology, much less a theology. Practice all forms of critical theory. Assume the social, the political, and the moral (namely, the horizontal) but never acknowledge the vertical. Ever.”